I'm enjoying the news coverage of Stephen Hawking's new book slightly too much, in a masochistic sort of way. Apparently, Hawking claims in The Grand Design that the Universe wasn't created by God. So far, so reasonable; Hawking describes himself as atheist (as do I), so his belief that the Universe came into being through a purely naturalistic mechanism is hardly surprising.

What is surprising, and what has been grating on me all day, is how this has been whipped up into some weird claim that physics is offering proof that God didn't create the Universe. So much bullshit! I haven't read Hawking's book, but from what I've managed to piece together from various news stories, it seems that he's arguing that M-theory (more on that later) implies that the Universe could have been ushered into existence by some consequence of gravity. Here's the quote:

"Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing [...] Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist."
 This doesn't look too unreasonable to me, but it's hardly news. People have been hypothesising that the universe popped into existence due to some quantum vacuum fluctuation for decades. There are plenty of more exotic ideas floating around too: our universe "pinched off" from a black hole in another universe, the Big Bang happened when two membranes in a higher-dimensional space collided, etc. But they're just ideas, flights of scientifically-constrained fancy, and lack any experimental justification or particular desirability on theoretical grounds. There are no good reasons to choose between any of these ideas, or to suppose that there aren't plenty of other as-yet unimagined options that are just as viable. Proof of God's inexistence they ain't.

The hyperbole shouldn't surprise me. It's likely that the story has its origins in a press release promoting the release of the book. The book itself is being serialised in The Times, and the BBC and Guardian were both carrying rather similar-looking stories this morning (paragraphs reordered, slightly reworded, clearly from the same source). The publishers are drumming up publicity by using ambiguous quotes and letting the media get the wrong end of the stick. I don't blame them, it's their job! But must journalists so efficiently take up and distort the half-truths being fed to them?

I just watched a tired-looking Jon Butterworth, CERN-side, debating this story with theologist and former physicist Alister McGrath on Channel 4 News. Jon Snow was presenting, giving the frequent melodramatic grimaces of disdain and self-enforced confusion that are obligatory for any news coverage of physics nowadays. The discussion went something along the lines of "science is a journey", "these ideas are a long way from being testable", and "no-one really takes this seriously". Hardly some earth-shattering scientific or theological advance, then.

The debate itself came after an explanatory piece where the science correspondent talked about string theory's role in linking quantum mechanics and "relativism" [sic, super face palm]. A couple of physicists were interviewed: the string theorist, rather shockingly, praised the efforts of the UK string theory community in elucidating M-theory, and a particle physicist vaguely testified to the potential plausibility of all this string theory business. I'm sure they didn't know exactly what Hawking was claiming, so they didn't really offer any meaningful analysis in my opinion.

This whole business irks me for several reasons. First of all, the science is being misrepresented to the public. M-theory, to the best of my understanding, is little more than a "proto-theory", the hint of an idea that may eventually lead to a unified theory of gravity and the other three fundamental forces of nature. Plenty of string theorists like the sound of M-theory and believe that it's the right way forward, but it's very far from gaining mainstream acceptance. So far, it makes no testable predictions, and doesn't even take a settled form that would make it useful for doing calculations. It's "vapourware", in other words. (Read The Trouble With Physics by Lee Smolin for an excellent account of the state of string theory.) As such, there's no scientific evidence that Hawking's account of how the Universe came into being has any truth to it; it's just a suggestion, a possibility among many others, which Hawking is picking out as his favourite. The media give the illusion that M-theory, and by extension all this God stuff, are settled issues in scientific quarters, which they certainly are not!

There's also the tension that this appears to generate between the religious and scientific communities. Already we have condemnations from the religious community. The "religious fightback" began in The Times, where Lord Sacks (the Chief Rabbi) said that "Professor Hawking’s conclusion that scientific developments exclude the possibility of a God was an “elementary fallacy” of logic." And so it will go: the scientists are wrong, misguided, arrogant to believe that they have anything to say about God. It's clearly ridiculous, where do they get off making this stuff up? Hawking's comments, whether taken out of context or not, will be assumed to represent the physics community as a whole, and we'll all be tarred with the same brush. We'll all look bad (or at least crazy) in the public's eyes, and they'll lose more of their confidence in our work. But the ideas being condemned and argued about are not representative of what most of us think, nor probably of Hawking himself!

Finally, I shudder to think of all the clueless coverage that we'll be seeing over the next week or so. The origin of the universe and the implications of scientific findings on philosophy and religion are incredibly interesting subjects which deserve discussion. But this won't lead to an intelligent debate; the argument is already a straw man, with none of the news stories I read or watched giving anything like an accurate reflection of current thinking about these issues. The opinion columns will dutifully argue from hastily-gathered quotes rather than digging into the literature and, you know, learning about these things, and the public will be left with a grotesque caricature of what are some of the more beautiful products of human thought. And that's a crying shame.

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My gloss on this picture: If you're confused, go back to the IKEA store and borrow their phone with a really long extension cord, so you can call support from the parking lot.

Last weekend, my husband and I helped a couple of friends, Amanda and Stephen, move into their first owned home. They took the occasion of this move to upgrade and expand their furniture collection with several new items from IKEA. And they hired a service to assemble the furniture. I hadn't realized that such services existed. I'll have to keep that in mind as an alternative career if I get burned out on this tech writing thing. I'm blessed with the right combination of visual, spatial, and motor abilities such that I actually enjoy assembling IKEA furniture. Not everyone is so fortunate (if you want to call it that). As Stephen said, "If I had to do all this, the result would be divorce and me burning the house down." As it happened, a miscommunication meant that the service didn't have time to assemble all the items, so I got to do a couple of them after all.

IKEA is known for keeping their prices as low as possible, and one of the ways they do that is with almost completely wordless pictorial instructions. The fewer words they use, the fewer words they have to pay to translate. The instructions for a bookshelf I recently assembled for myself included a single note that was translated into 18 languages, and therefore took up about half a page. Minimizing text also reduces page count and printing costs. Another way that IKEA reduces printing costs is by using newsprint-quality paper for the instructions in some (but not all) products. Unfortunately, this means that the print quality is also low, and fine details can be difficult to discern for all but the sharpest eyes. Figuring out how pieces fit together can depend on matching the positions of tiny dots in the diagram to those of holes in the physical pieces, so fine details matter a lot.

Wordless instructions may transcend language, but that does not mean that they are universally usable. Some people are just not visual learners. Amanda said, "I can't make sense of those diagrams, but I can do it when Janet explains it." She's more comfortable with verbal instructions than visual ones. In other cases, physical limitations are the issue rather than cognitive style. Stephen is an awesome photographer; he's also visually impaired, so those tiny dots on newsprint are a non-starter. The same can be true for those of us who find our arms getting shorter as we get older and our near-distance vision degrades.

No doubt IKEA has carefully weighed the costs and benefits, and determined that wordless instructions make the best sense for their business. Wordless instructions are sufficient for the majority of their customers, and many of the rest can be helped by phone support. They leave open a market opportunity for furniture assembly services, and IKEA doesn't mind ceding the space, as long as they still sell bookshelves. I wonder if there's also a tiny market niche for verbal instructions to go along with the pictorial ones.

From this morning's joint press release: Deployment Adds Enterprise-Grade Redundancy for Improved Reliability, Reduced Latency, High-Speed Backups and Other Efficiencies BOULDER, CO, August 10, 2010 — The FreeBSD Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to supporting the FreeBSD Project and community, today announced that NYI, a New York City-based, mission-critical data services provider, will be mirroring key West coast infrastructure at NYI's 999 Frontier Road data center in Bridgewater, New Jersey, a recently opened 4

The fall conference season is starting to gear up. I'll be presenting at the following conferences as well as proctoring BSDA exams and assisting at the *BSD booth. If you're attending any of these and would like to help out at the booth, let me know.

The FreeBSD Foundation is now accepting travel grants for EuroBSDCon to be held in Karlsruhe, Germany from October 8-10. From the announcement:

Registration has opened for MeetBSD California, to be held in Mountain View on November 5-6. From the announcement:

On announcers: Watch a game for an inning with no volume. See if you miss anything. [link]

BSD Mag will be launching a Russian version in September. They are looking for authors, betatesters and proofreaders with Russian as a native language. If you're interested in helping out, contact the BSD Mag Editor.

The August issue of BSD Mag is available for free download. From the table of contents:

The official PC-BSD blog was launched today (it's also my first day of working full-time with the PC-BSD community). From the welcome entry:

I should have blogged more about it, but I already suck at blogging (I have to improve this), and also the Internet connection was not really working well with my computer at the conference (now I’m using the hotel connection!). One world: AWESOME. My first GUADEC, and I’m really enjoying it. A lot of interesting [...]

Mozilla Labs has announced the winners of the Contacts Design Challenge, which posed the question to designers of "What are the interesting uses of having a complete list of all your contacts and relationships in your browser, for both local browser applications and services on the web?" The design concepts honored by the judging panel are great, and put forward many useful ideas. Go take a look and then come back here.

None of the design concepts quite addresses the use case that I've recently felt a need for, which is defining groups of contacts from multiple sources, to use within web applications.

Since I've started working remotely from home, I sometimes choose to go sit and work in one of several local coffee shops, for a change of scenery and some live interaction. I know a number of other remote and self-employed workers, who I know also work from coffee shops sometimes. It would be great if we could coordinate so that some of us are at the same coffee shop at the same time. There are web-based services like Foursquare and Yelp that support sending notifications about one's location. But I don't want to require all my coffee buddies to join yet another web service. Some of them are on Facebook, but I don't want to annoy my out-of-town Facebook friends with an update every time I visit a coffee shop. Some of them are on Twitter, but I don't want to end up on Please Rob Me by broadcasting to the universe that I'm not at home. For some of my contacts, I just have an email address, or a mobile phone number that I could send a text message to.

What I want is to not only have all my contacts from various sources aggregated, as in Toby Shorin's design concept, but to define groups of contacts, regardless of the source of the contact. Then, when I want to send an update to members of that group, the software automatically takes care of sending that update to each member of the group, in a way appropriate to the source of the contact. Better yet, sending to those groups should be available to web applications, so that I could tell Foursquare to notify my Coffee Buddies group, just as it currently can update my Facebook or Twitter accounts.

That's what I want. Now I just need to get Mozilla Labs to make it happen.

The FreeBSD Foundation's semi-annual Newsletter is now available. There's a lot of information in this edition, including:

AboutBSD launched recently as a new planet for aggregating *BSD blogs. The founder of the site describes the goals of the website as follows:

I'm starting to put together my presentation for SummerCamp 2010. The presentation will discuss how to get started in an open source community. Do you have any questions you would like to see covered in such a presentation?

The autumn conference season is starting to gel and the BSDA exam will be available at a number of events across the globe. The conferences we have confirmed so far include:

Jim Brown from the BSD Certification Group provides an update on the BSDP exam objectives. We hope to publish these by end of month or very early August, and need as many people as possible to review and comment on the draft before it is published. Jim writes:

The latest FreeBSD quarterly status report has updates on some of the GSoC projects. Lots of interesting functionality coming down the pipe. From the report: